Chancellor's Parashah Commentary

The recent conference in New York City on "Feminism and
Orthodoxy" heralds a major escalation in the confrontation
between Jewishly well-educated Orthodox feminists and a
bitterly defensive rabbinic establishment. The word on the
street in the weeks before the conference was that it would
be a brief one, implying that the two topics had nothing in
common. But reality proved the cynics wrong. Nearly a
thousand Orthodox women of all stripes convened for two
days of study, prayer and protest to challenge the gender
inequities that abound in contemporary Orthodoxy. The plight
of women stranded without benefit of a Jewish divorce from
their husbands evoked an added measure of outrage.

The conference gave notice that a growing body of literate
and learned Orthodox women would no longer accept the
talmudic put-down that "the wisdom of women is restricted to
the spindle." On the basis of this alleged inferiority, women
had always been systematically denied equal education by the
traditional Jewish community. In his great codification of
Jewish law, Maimonides softened the degree of exclusion ever
so slightly. He distinguished between teaching girls Torah and
Talmud. The former was permissible though not desirable.
The latter, under no circumstances, because women, "given
their intellectual impoverishment will turn the words of Torah
(i.e. Talmud) into words of folly."

Twenty years ago Maimonides' formulation still governed the
conduct of just about the entire Orthodox world. The study
of Talmud remained beyond the reach of Orthodox women.
The barrier was breached in Jerusalem when a woman
doctoral student at the Seminary joined the faculty of Pelech,
a highly regarded modern Orthodox high school for young
women. Over the vociferous protests of the faculty, but with
the strong backing of the principal, she introduced a course in
Mishna and later even in Talmud. Today, Talmud is studied so
widely by Orthodox women that Tradition, a journal of
Orthodox Jewish thought put out by the Rabbinical Council of
America, devoted a section of its Spring 1994 issue to a
symposium on women and Jewish education.

Without this prior curricular revolution, the conference could
never have been held. Education for a disenfranchised group
is always an instrument of empowerment, a challenge to the
way things are. Mastery of the corpus of rabbinic literature
exposed Orthodox women to a culture where diversity of
practice and belief is licit and the evolution of legal institutions
amply documented. Rabbinic Judaism did not descend
full-blown from Mount Sinai, nor are present norms the only
pattern of observance yielded by the sources. The demand by
the women in attendance for greater inclusion in the religious
arena of the community is a direct and inevitable outgrowth
of their new-found knowledge. In Judaism the ultimate goal
of study has always been to enrich practice. Since historically
women were expected to observe less (that is, freed from
mitzvot that were time-bound), they were taught far less.

Our parasha this week is not unrelated to the role of women
in Judaism. Moses is about to inform the people of God's
instructions for the building of the Tabernacle, for which
purpose he assembles "the whole community (Exodus 35:1)."
That this certainly includes also the women of Israel is
affirmed by the subsequent narrative. Not only do the men
contribute their personal belongings voluntarily and generously
to the sacred task, but so do the women. We read: "And all
the skilled women spun with their own hands, and brought
what they had spun, in blue, purple, and crimson yarns, and
in fine linen (35:25)." Later we are told that another group of
women stationed at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting gave
their mirrors (38:8). More generally, all the men and women
inspired to get involved hastened to give, until the priests
urged Moses to bring the campaign for the Tabernacle to a
close (35:22, 36:5). No one was excluded on the basis of
gender.

The Talmud chose to read these passages more restrictively.
Why does the Torah single out woven cloth as the noteworthy
contribution of women (35:25)? Because this is the only craft
at which they excel. And hence the uncharitable
generalization which I cited above: "The wisdom of women is
restricted to the spindle."

Elsewhere, the Talmud specifically removed girls from the
realm of formal education. On the verse "and teach them to
your children [literally sons'— Deuteronomy 11:19]" toward
the end of the second paragraph of the Shema, the Talmud
explicitly excluded daughters. Yet there is nothing inherent in
the verse to dictate this narrow interpretation. The Rabbis
could just as legitimately have understood the word
"beneikhem" to mean "your children" (as does the JPS
translation I quoted) as "your sons." At work in this piece of
exegesis is a cultural bias that would prevail deep into the
twentieth century.

By way of illustration, I shall make reference to my favorite
traditional commentator, Rabbi Baruch Halevi Epstein, the
author of the incomparable Torah Temima. He died in
1941 at the age of 80, shortly after the Nazis had entered the
largely Jewish city of Pinsk, where Epstein lived ever since his
return from America. A prominent banker with a command of
modern languages and culture, Epstein moved easily between
the competing worlds of the Lithuanian rabbinic elite and the
secular Zionists. Few in either camp could match his lucid,
supple and graceful Hebrew prose.

And yet Epstein in his commentary on the above two talmudic
passages gives no ground. He remains convinced that women
lack the intellectual depth to grasp talmudic matter clearly and
firmly. Its abstract principles elude their understanding, and
hence their superior intellectual adroitness, which he
concedes, goes to work on talmudic material ill conceived and
hardly penetrated by them. Women are only facile, not deep.

The admission of women to the study of Talmud as equals is
thus a recent departure from tradition of radical proportions.
Even the most enlightened of Orthodox leaders but a few
generations back would never have countenanced such a
reform. The conference on "Feminism and Orthodoxy" marks
the start of the campaign to carry egalitarianism from the beis
midrash into the synagogue. Should these women be
unwisely denied, will they not find themselves gravitating
toward Conservative Judaism?